Indonesia.

Making a weekend getaway to Indonesia is a relatively easy task. For 45 Sing, you can take a round-trip boat trip from the Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal to Bintan, one of the largest islands in the Riau province. Once you arrive, you can take an hour-long taxi drive to a relatively isolated strip of beach occupied by a handful of private wooden beach huts. If you don't mind the lack of air conditioning, you can spend a night there for the rough equivalent of 9 U.S. dollars and meet Lobo and his family, the people who run this idyllic little place.

I shit you not, my friends. You can literally spend a night in a wooden beach hut.

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How do you describe the perfect weekend getaway (which is a cliched phrase in itself) without resorting to cliche? What do you do when, without a single shred of exaggeration, the ocean really is clear, the stars brilliant (you can see the Milky Way!), the food excellent and the locals friendly? When the lettering on the wooden sign welcoming you to Shady Shack is so wonderfully worn-down you can almost swear that it was done on purpose for kitschy effect? Perhaps the crowning moment of this near-perfect surreality was when we were offered a drink of coconuts, handpicked from the tree right before our eyes and consumed with a straw straight from the shell. These things aren't supposed to happen in real life.

The lazy writer's way out, of course, is to post a bunch of pretty pictures. And swear that they were not cut out from a travel brochure. [Photos courtesy of the ever-crazy Chris Hsien.]






Everyone rides motorbikes in Indonesia. It is the Indonesian equivalent of the family mini-van. On our way to Shady Shack, it was not uncommon to see an entire family--a mother and a father cradling a small child on their laps or in-between their bodies--all fitting on a single motorbike.

I really want to explore the rest of Indonesia. Kids play soccer on the streets and random street festivals occur throughout the city. Unlike Singapore, there is litter on the ground fucking everywhere. There is something about this place that is downright raucous, dirty and thrilling.

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That weekend, all we did was play. We forgot about time and pretended we were kids again. We swam when we were hot, sunbathed on the beach when we got lazy, ate food when we were hungry and immersed ourselves into feeling the texture of coral washed up on the shore or watching a tiny jellyfish struggle against the ocean current.

At night, a young woman named Rina served us homemade Indonesian food with steamed rice. Someone made a makeshift bonfire right on the beach. And then someone else started playing the guitar and everyone in Lobo's family started singing songs in Indonesian.

When you have a combination of fire, music and beer on an Indonesian coastline, you can pretty much say that life is grand at this point.



The five of us from the States wandered away from the huts to gaze at the stars. At one point, we decided to lie down and fell asleep right on the beach. We woke up an hour or so later to sleep properly inside the hut. We then woke up at six in the morning to watch the sun rise and walk across the shore where the tide was low. We watched tiny, near-transparent crabs dart briefly across the sand before digging themselves into tiny holes in the ground.





It rained very briefly. Melissa and I (the only two girls on the trip) fell asleep back at our hut to the sound of rain and ocean. We woke up again for a very late breakfast--omelette and coffee with a lot of condensed milk and sugar.

We had a final dinner at some hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the ferry site. They served us many small plates loaded with squid, chicken, beef and vegetables--most of them covered in something really spicy.

We didn't get back to NUS until maybe eleven in the evening. Since I didn't bring a camera with me, the only thing I have to show for my trip is a dark tan and a lot of Indonesian sand falling out of my hair. I was so exhausted I fell asleep like that, all sticky from sunscreen and ocean air.

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It took me maybe four weeks to get to this point, but I feel like finally, an equilibrium has been reached between my external environment and my internal landscape. I no longer feel so randomly anxious, and I dare say that NUS is starting to feel like home.

It's liberating to be reminded that the human mind can adjust to any situation if given enough time. A mundane routine can be made out of the most foreign circumstances.